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My date took me to a bar that was open late. We sat round a splendid banquette like pashas. At the table one tier down, a girl sitting with her friends unfurled a really strange laugh. It was high and sort of squeaky-grunty, very loud: within moments she had drained the whole place of its […]

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On the bus coming home from our forest walk we passed a billboard for Hochzeitswelt: Wedding World. My partner says it’s a giant sales emporium but I am convinced it is some kind of fun park. At the market hall we got out and walked. I was noticing the graffiti – hereabouts is my own […]

Yesterday a German friend asked me, could you ever imagine to live in Germany permanently. I guess my laugh was unflattering. Why not, he said. I’m sorry, but… the way you guys run your country – it’s like a bunch of very well-behaved eldest children looking after the place while their mummy and daddy are […]

Such a jolly lady in the village post office just now. She really made my day happier. Expertly popping up and then deconstructing one box after another until I could figure out which size I needed to buy, each with a hint of a flourish, like an auctioneer. “And here… we have the Number 3…. […]

A German friend trying to understand a phone call from a Polish colleague just asked me could I stop typing… as I was rattling away at a fine old pace and it was very distracting. I learned to type on an old manual typewriter where you had to exert actual pressure to get the keys […]

Cavernous cafe in Berlin during the changeover period from Friday afternoon caff to Friday night bar. The music is gradually speeding up and the staff become flirtier, including with each other. People still working on their laptops are hunched with concentration, trying to get it all down. Two extremely buff men who came in with […]

On the lake, ducks and ducklings, geese and goslings, and a pair of swans bobbed about with the tiny grey morsels of fluff my dyslexic ex used to call ‘swanlings.’ “Look, Oel! A mamma and a pappa swan… and all the little swanlings.”  

Walking home past an outdoor restaurant in town that provides rugs for its hardier patrons. Everyone else was huddled indoors, it’s barely ten degrees and the wind is icy. A woman wearing a piled confection of blonded whipped hair drew on her cigarette as I passed and said, drawlingly, “…but it’s ok. I paid him […]

I have a cute, European friend who talks about money in the slang sense as “bugs.” This cost 75 bugs and the other was a steal at only 20 bugs. To talk about bucks of course makes no more sense: why would a male deer have more value than a bear, a bitch, a bison? […]

My friend lives by a rapid, cold river in northern Switzerland; her little village is a lot more built-up than it was when I was last here. We walked by the river in silence and a kind of sadness for what has become of the landscape. You have to kind of relax your mind away […]

Went to the outdoor store to try on their $1000 goose-down & coyote fur jackets. “Made in Canada,” the sales guy explained as I was falling about laughing at the price: “Canadian wages.” “Ah,” I said. “Everyone wants Fair Trade but no one wants to pay any more for it.” He leveled his trigger finger […]

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Girl on the tram, to her friend: “It made me wanna throw up. And not in a good way.”